Public access to art can be traumatic. When tourists and art lovers move through museums displaying Renaissance art, they may encounter scenes of dinner gatherings with unexpected meals being served where it is a human head presented on a plate. The theme of Herod’s feast continued to fascinate European painters in the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries. Among them were the Cranachs—the father (Lucas Cranach the Older 1472–1553) and the son (Lucas Cranach the Younger 1515–1586) in Wittenberg. As was usual, the painters depended on the donors who ordered and paid for the paintings—in the sixteenth century. Six years later, a second painting of the same scene—now mainly authored by Lucas Cranach the Younger—came out of the Workshop of the Cranachs. Lucas Cranach the Younger was born in 1515—so at the time the painting in Fig. 3.2 was completed, he was 22 years old. In that same year—1537—he moved into the manager role of the Workshop of his father, Lucas Cranach the Older (1472–1553) who had also painted Herod’s Dinner scene six years before. I use the material of paintings to illustrate basic processes of social representation of moral acts. The story of Herod’s Feast goes through a number of translations over the two millennia. The particular message in communication—first created in its verbal form (retellings of story in oral transfer) becomes written down in some form in a source of high value (the Bible). The story now becomes translated into various pictorial forms each of which extends the message in some direction—expanding the sign fields involved in the message. It is here where a social representation—a heterogeneous sign field—is emerging. The artwork expands the pleromatic fields of the message, is then transposed to music and becomes—by the twenty-first century—a multimodal myth story about something very different from the origin (resolving political and marriage tensions) to a social representation of the woman as the resource of all units of beauty, passion, and violence. This representation becomes encoded as a hyper-generalized sign field that guides the intuitive handling of gender relations toward apprehensive ambivalence in ordinary life contexts. Thus people go to theater or opera house to watch Salome on the stage—followed by fascination or indignation about the performance. The transformations of the small Biblical side-story of killing of a political opponent—preacher—has, over centuries, become generalized into a social representation of the unity of beauty and danger of feminine seduction. The field of this representation is ambivalent—including violence, desire, and passion. The field has transformed of the two millennia. The actual origin of the story—making fatal promises and fixating these as binding—has been lost in the middle of artistic depiction of putting severed heads on a silver plate. Gender is the most usable arena for promoting ambiguities in any society. Behind its seductive flavors more central issues of social power relations are being negotiated.

A Head on a Plate: The Making of a Social Representation

章节
发表日期：

2025年

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Jaan Valsiner

摘要

Public access to art can be traumatic. When tourists and art lovers move through museums displaying Renaissance art, they may encounter scenes of dinner gatherings with unexpected meals being served where it is a human head presented on a plate. The theme of Herod’s feast continued to fascinate European painters in the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries. Among them were the Cranachs—the father (Lucas Cranach the Older 1472–1553) and the son (Lucas Cranach the Younger 1515–1586) in Wittenberg. As was usual, the painters depended on the donors who ordered and paid for the paintings—in the sixteenth century. Six years later, a second painting of the same scene—now mainly authored by Lucas Cranach the Younger—came out of the Workshop of the Cranachs. Lucas Cranach the Younger was born in 1515—so at the time the painting in Fig. 3.2 was completed, he was 22 years old. In that same year—1537—he moved into the manager role of the Workshop of his father, Lucas Cranach the Older (1472–1553) who had also painted Herod’s Dinner scene six years before. I use the material of paintings to illustrate basic processes of social representation of moral acts. The story of Herod’s Feast goes through a number of translations over the two millennia. The particular message in communication—first created in its verbal form (retellings of story in oral transfer) becomes written down in some form in a source of high value (the Bible). The story now becomes translated into various pictorial forms each of which extends the message in some direction—expanding the sign fields involved in the message. It is here where a social representation—a heterogeneous sign field—is emerging. The artwork expands the pleromatic fields of the message, is then transposed to music and becomes—by the twenty-first century—a multimodal myth story about something very different from the origin (resolving political and marriage tensions) to a social representation of the woman as the resource of all units of beauty, passion, and violence. This representation becomes encoded as a hyper-generalized sign field that guides the intuitive handling of gender relations toward apprehensive ambivalence in ordinary life contexts. Thus people go to theater or opera house to watch Salome on the stage—followed by fascination or indignation about the performance. The transformations of the small Biblical side-story of killing of a political opponent—preacher—has, over centuries, become generalized into a social representation of the unity of beauty and danger of feminine seduction. The field of this representation is ambivalent—including violence, desire, and passion. The field has transformed of the two millennia. The actual origin of the story—making fatal promises and fixating these as binding—has been lost in the middle of artistic depiction of putting severed heads on a silver plate. Gender is the most usable arena for promoting ambiguities in any society. Behind its seductive flavors more central issues of social power relations are being negotiated.